SAS^® Forum Milan 2016

Marco Icardi, Vice President Central East Europe, SAS opened the plenary session: “Three years ago we talked about Analytics Culture; last year the focus was on Analytics for Everyone, with new tools to facilitate the use of analytics pervasively in the company. Today’s event is dedicated to Analytics Everywhere, underlining the widespread of analytic solutions." The driving force is the Internet of Things that affects many aspects of the everyday life and contributes to the data explosion, opening the doors to new business models and services. "The economist Jeremy Rifkin talks about the third industrial revolution, at zero marginal cost" say Marco Icardi. The modern era is characterized by many disruptive elements: product co-development with customers, interpenetration of industries, "new deal on data" (people share personal information in change for value added services); democratization of information and analytics; streaming analytics to process data when they are generated.

Many speakers on the stage shared extraordinary experiences with analytics. Stefano Mancuso, Director of LINV, International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, University of Florence, has shown how plants think and solve complex problems, thanks to a set of twenty senses connected to thousands of receptors (unlike animals, they don’t have a brain as a unique center of thought and command). "99.7% of the living beings in the world is vegetable: it means that plants have developed a superior adaptive capacity, based on swarm intelligence within a same body (the plants are not individuals, but colonies of elements). The same collective intelligence characterizes all living things as well as man" the scientist explained. Mancuso offered some examples of how the union of ordinary people without rules and hierarchies can unravel unsolved problems intuitively: "The ability to use the collective intelligence is the key for innovation."

While Barbara Cominelli, Director Commercial Operations and Digital - Vodafone Italia, showed the importance of Big Data and Analytics to capture the digital moments and build a better customer journey, Tamara Dull - Director of Emerging Technologies for SAS Best Practices, highlights the opportunities and risks of IoT, which can be cool (it enables new features that facilitate processes and activities) or creepy because it threatens the privacy and security of personal data: "Making the IoT safe is a duty for anyone: consumers, citizens, private and public companies."

Talking with Emanuela Sferco, Regional Marketing Director Central East Europe, SAS, Mauro Maldonato, Psychiatrist and Professor of General Psychopathology, University of Basilicata, shared some thoughts about decision-making process. “We are living a disruptive moment. With technology progress, things are changing very fast and our brain can’t easily adapt. People decide in many different ways, but it’s really important to find the balance between intuition and reason, having the ability to take risks.”

Andrea Nelson Mauro and Alessio Cimarelli, Data journalists and data scientists, Founders of DataNinja, explained how to build simple narrations with data drawn from science, daily life, history, current affairs, business requirements, making understandable complex facts.

After the extraordinary show performed by Miyoko Shida Rigolo - Choreographer, Zen Dancer, Icardi presented the latest news from SAS: “We launched the new architecture SAS Viya, designed to meet the needs of analysis in real-time (streaming analytics) and to manage the huge volumes of data generated by the IoT. It is an open architecture with new machine learning capabilities, thought to be cloud-ready, able to integrate with third party and open source solutions (for example, Hadoop). All our solutions will move to the new architecture. Among other innovations, we invested to create digital learning programs for partners and customers, which enable a more rapid and immediate training model contributing to the spread of analytics culture."